botswana: the only way to play guitar

how to do the Diski Dance

by the wonderful iSchoolAfrica World Cup Press Team:

iSchoolAfrica: Soccer's offside rule explained

Martín Ruiz de Azúa

Martín Ruiz de Azúa. Medallas Campeonato Europa de Atletismo Barcelona 2010

Martín Ruiz de Azúa is a tremendously inventive Barcelona designer who has recently designed the medals for the European Athletics Championships being held in Barcelona July 26-August 1, 2010.

It is interesting, this medal, as it leaves the military tradition of the minted coin as a medal and concentrates instead on the ribbon holding the medal, undercutting the formality of a symmetrical disc.  Azúa has designed previous medals that play with eccentricity: an off-centre ellipse for the 2005 European Athletic Championships in Madrid – immediately one thinks of the shape of an elliptical track.  For the World Swimming Championships in Barcelona 2003, the medal was a large disc holding a flat lens full of water and air bubbles: 'water the main part of the medal and the principal element of the sport'.  The ribbon was translucent silicon, much like the bands that hold swimming goggles in place. 

Given Spain's difficult past, especially Franco's imposition of a near obsessive respect for military pomp and tradition – uniforms, castles, massive formalistic memorials, it is no wonder that new Spanish design rejects any aspect that could possibly reflect those monstrous traditions.  It is a political and social imperative to re-think everything, so much an imperative that it has become second nature.  And this why, since the early 1980s, we have looked to Barcelona for a kind of pure modernism that only looks forward.

Mags Harries, Asaroton (Unswept Floor), 1976

Mags Harries. Asaraton (Unswept Floor), 1976. Boston, MassachussettsAsaroton was a public art project by Mags Harries for Massachussetts' bicentennial in the Haymarket in Boston.  Market debris has been cast in bronze and embedded in a crosswalk, part of Boston's Freedom Trail.  'Asaroton' describes Roman scraps of food, long since fossilised.  And then in the title comes (Unswept Floor) with its guilty domesticity.  This piece marks the market and the detritus left on the streets and in the gutters when the market closes.  It valorises the everyday: a crushed cardboard box in bronze becomes a beautiful, abstract thing, without monumentality, something difficult to achieve at the scale of a public art project. 

We have so much monumentality, so much at the large scale, so many broad strokes in our cities.  The public realm, or the fairly meaningless descriptions 'public space' or even worse, 'green space' is not developed from the small detail, the scale of the foot or the hand, but is constructed at the scale of the crane, the flatbed truck, the swipe of brick paving texture on the plan.

One does wonder if civic public art programs which take a percentage of the cost of new developments for sculpture on the street, or on the plaza, or on the plinth are necessary compensations for the lack of the small-scale intimate detail in the modern city.  It isn't about supporting art, as is claimed, but is a deep desire to achieve beauty that in other eras was a component of ordinary civic engineering. 

Historic 18th century Boston is stuffed with beauty; perhaps this is why it understood a project that is so essentially humble and tender. 

Mags Harries. Asaraton (Unswept Floor), 1976. Boston, Massachussets

more sidewalk details

Joseph Clement. New York sidewalk details. Spacing, September 6, 2007Joseph Clement had a great piece in Spacing a couple of years ago on New York's sidewalks.  I found it when I was looking about for the glass block inserts.  He makes the point that when the sidewalk takes the place of a back alley for loading and services it makes for very wide pavements: clearly this proportional difference makes a better ground for pedestrian life.  The flâneur simply couldn't flan on niggardly strips of concrete pressed up against parked cars or downtown traffic. 

The photo above shows the care with which water is conducted away from seams between metal and paving.  Whenever the manhole cover was installed, or the glass lens panel laid, someone was thinking about longevity and the details needed to keep rain water from pooling, from splashing.  Again it is like the design of the cat's eyes where two glass marbles are set in a heavy rubber block which compresses if a car tire runs over it.  In front of the marbles is a small well to collect water, so when the rubber compresses the water rinses the front of the glass marbles keeping them clean.  There is tremendous attention to detail here that goes beyond the ease of installation and is more about imagining the post-installation working life of the product.  What a quaint idea.   

unstable surfaces

La Jolla, California, 2007Now, here's an example of the ground beneath one's feet being completely ambiguous, certainly mysterious: how deep is the slump beneath this sink hole?  Is it at the level of the water table, or the aquifer, or a mile deep?  This photo looks like something by Jeff Wall: a small suburban crisis.

If you click on the picture it will take you to a Guardian photo series of other, recent sink holes.

sidewalk glass blocks

Yesterday's glass block lights remind me of the heavy glass block panels let into sidewalks that provided light to cellar spaces under the pavements.  Haven't seen these for years, although they were once very common, and in looking around for pictures found lots of websites about their preservation.  The Ringuettes have a good site on the sidewalk glass prisms of Victoria BC where all the downtown sidewalks appear to have had lenses. 

Glass prisms, either square or round, are set in structural metal frames and then the whole unit spans the sidewalk over the basement level storage or working space.  They date from the early 1900s and are found extensively in old sections of cities that have either been preserved as historic districts or are so run down as to have escaped modernisation, which in sidewalk terms usually means concreting over the glass sections.

Originally clear glass, the manganese used in glass in the early 1900s  has turned these lenses a deep amethyst with exposure to sun. I remember Victoria's glass sidewalks as being quite dark glass — but I've also seen glass panels in London that are white and shine brightly at night when the cellars below the sidewalks have their lights on.  It was this that I thought of with the LED glass blocks. 

The sense that downtown sidewalks are actually roofs, that the sidewalk is not ground beneath your feet but a hollow space in which people are working, registers a lovely kind of urban knowledge.  In contrast, the total pedestrianisation of downtown streets such as 8th Avenue in Calgary, or Granville in Vancouver, where one can wander willy nilly from street wall to street wall as if the road was a creekbed at the bottom of two cliffs, where everything is up, lacks this sense that the pedestrian surface is a fragile skin between a shadowy underworld and a bright thrusting upperworld.  

It also indicates an ambiguity of ownership and property: who owns that bit under the sidewalk?  In cities obsessed with property and jurisdiction, such as Calgary, this ambiguity is not allowed.  This is a city where corporate security patrols the edges where plaza meets sidewalk, where one cannot take photographs of the public sidewalk from a private-public plaza, or photos of the private-public plaza from the public sidewalk.  The lines are hard here, the sidewalks concrete.

Norm Ringuette. Blanchard Street, Victoria, BC. 2006

glass block lights

the Tuff Block Light installedA press release came in the mail today about a glass block with LED lighting embedded in it.  It is from Arizona, and the brochure stresses that the inventor is Harold P Kopp, Blind Veteran, USN Retired.  The website is even more curious: the back story of Kopp's various bouts with illness appears to be as important as product information. It is certainly more important than spelling.  Whatever, the lights have a life of 50,000 hours and are laid in with regular brick or block paving.  The brochure appears to come from some other century altogether.  Is this one man working away in his garage, inventing clever electrical devices and then running off product information on his printer and mailing them at some expense to architecture magazines all over the continent?  It appears so. 

It is a bit like the cat's eyes story where Percy Shaw laboured away in near-destitution for 5 years during the depression before someone in the Ministry of Transport recognised that with the blackout conditions in WWII in England, some sort of low-level road lighting system such as reflective marbles embedded in the road would be of some use. 

The cost of the Tuff Block Light is prohibitive: $US 80 each, plus all the wiring laid down the side of your driveway, or patio or sidewalk.  To get something like this to take off it would need a large government contract attached to some sort of safety bylaw, then when it was in production in a mass-market sort of way, one could start to do some quite nice things with these blocks.   On second thought,  I'll wait for one with photovoltaic cells.  On third thought, I'll just use a hand crank flashlight.  No. On fourth thought, I'll just eat more carrots and develop my night vision. 

João Luis Carrilho da Graça: Ponte Pedonal, Carpinteira

Fernando Guerro, FG+SG. Ponte Pedonal, Covilha. see reportage 403 when you get to the website.

It is odd which architects in other countries come to our attention and which don't.  João Luis Carrilho da Graça has a huge reputation in Portugal, many awards, a long and stellar career of relentlessly minimal sculptural modernist work.  Websites are full of dramatic photos of shooting white wall planes, hard blue skies.  The work of Alvaro Siza, who has a much larger critical reputation outside Portugal, appears almost hand-made in comparison: shaped and trogdylitic, lots of saudade, absent in Carrilho da Graça.

However, FG+SG sent us this da Graça footbridge over the Carpinteira near Covilha a little while ago: new photographs, the bridge was designed in 2003 and finished in 2009.   It is a 220m pedestrian bridge, centre piece perpendicular to the stream bed and valley, the two end sections determined by anchoring points.   Hard to find much hard information on the engineering, materials or constructions but I did find this news clip which appears to discuss the controversial nature of the project:


As I write this, I'm also listening to a radio program about Louise Bourgeois who died a couple of days ago.  She says 'all my work is suggestive, not explicit.  The explicit is boring'.  This footbridge is very explicit, its engineering is beautifully calculated to just draw a brave line across the valley — and there it sits, nothing ulterior or mysterious about it.  One might wonder if this is the ultimate limitation of the modernists, that in the past 30 years of layered signification in urban environments and in architecture, this kind of minimalism ultimately says too little to sustain a conversation beyond its engineering. 

The question is perhaps why we have asked our architecture to speak eloquently about the human condition, rather than just containing, with some sort of grace, the human condition. 

Fernando Guerro, FG+SG. Ponte Pedonal Covilha, 2010

PLANT: roof garden at Nathan Phillips Square

PLANT. Sedum garden, Nathan Pillips Square, Toronto 2010.

Rooftop garden atop the podium at Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto.  Once the acme of Brasilia-like windswept concrete pavers named open space in the plan, the top of the podium is now a garden of sedums of various hues and heights.  Sedums store water in their leaves and are primitive fat-leaved clustering plants that one can imagine were chums of horsetails and such plants trampled by dinosaurs.   They are also known as Stonecrops, succulents and sempervivums – all Crassulaceae of various genuses.  Sempervivums (which means live forever) have a curious hermaphroditic reproductive cycle, and some species were used medicinally in ancient Greece.  They are also called houseleeks in some places, especially those with slate roofs on which they can live.  Good luck evidently. 
The podium garden will be a sturdy garden, frost resistant, drought tolerant and beautifully coloured.  The garden opened this week, pictures are on Plant's website.

Other things on this website include a really great 20' x 70' back yard in Cabbagetown: a minimal masterpiece which goes up a hill to a terrace at the very back walled by brick-filled gabions.  No grass, just deck, gravel and a folded metal plate stair that makes a path through precisely planted bands of plants chosen for seasonal colour and texture.  The planting pattern doesn't show in the photos, but on the plan one can see everything is planted in rows. 

The garden at the Schindler House comes to mind, reconstructed supposedly to Schindler's original plans where the ground was pushed about in strips: a ditch, a berm the shape of a speed bump, a flat bit: each condition planted with something different – what ever grew well in ditches went there for example, or specific grasses on the overly-drained berm.  There was a romantic relationship between the rigorous organisation of the garden and the willfulness of plants all shaggy and blowing about, and all of this with the concrete house walls as background. 

Plant's Wellesley Cottages garden has this same simplicity and the same uncompromising severity.  It is amusing, this fierce kind of organisation of the near-unorganisable.  It just looks so brave and so wonderful.

PLANT. Wellesley Cottage garden

Vivienda prefabricada en Cedeira: MYCC Arquitectos

Fernando Guerro, FG+SG. Vivienda prefabricada en Cedeira, MYCC Arquitectos, Madrid. 2010

MYCC  consists of three Spanish architects who studied variously in Dresden, Rotterdam, Vienna and Dortmund and then all arrived at ETSAMadrid, graduating in 2005.  Carmina Casajuana specialises in housing and urban design, Beatriz Casares works with Arquitectura Viva and Marcos Gonzalez is a specialist in urban environments. 

The project shown here is a pre-fabricated house in Galiza: Prefab House Cedeira. MYCC's statement about prefabrication and modularity clearly distinguishes between houses that are manufactured and those that are built – 'Something that leads us to believe in the efficient assembly line of an industrial building, covered and controlled, unlike a traditional work setting at the mercy of external factors that determine the construction.' 

Nothing too controversial here, this has been the argument for pre-fabrication for decades.  However, there isn't a great history of pre-fab housing in Europe: it simply isn't in their architectural tradition as it is in North America.  MYCC appears to be unhindered by the conventions of pre-fabrication with which our manufactured homes seem to struggle. 

Right, so it is about the design, not the process.  Perhaps.  This house has a loft, it has a glass front, it has a rusted steel screen over the glass front with workable shutters in it.  It is really beautiful, minimal, efficient, romantic.  It looks like an art gallery, it really is a cabin in the woods. 

Side walls and roof are the same material: from the photos it looks like an insulated steel panel.  We have these.  They are made in Airdrie and used to make ghastly imitation new urbanism housing for northern reserves.  However, here in the Casa Cedeira, the side walls and roof wrap the two storeys: the gable end walls are glass and steel.  How do we know this isn't Canada?  None of the steps have handrails and so they read as plane changes.  The main view of the ocean is screened, protected, rationed.  The relationship between house and landscape, even given that this house is newly constructed and the site is still scarred, is pretty uncompromising: it sits like a barn — neither the house nor the landscape are mediated or softened.  The hard line between building and site seems to have an urban sensibility to me.  Anything romantic about it is contained within the building itself, in the screen, in the light and shadows inside, not in its relationship with nature. 

I wonder if in Canada with our well discussed and theorised relationship with nature and survival, our cabins and cottages, camps and summer houses aren't too apologetic in their architecture, trying to either be invisible, or so deferential to things such as 'the view' that nature (whether it be the beach, the woods, or the front street) is over-exposed and unremitting.   Cedeira is more like a little fortress, autonomous and very much in control of its position.

Fernando Guerro, FG+SG. Vivienda prefabricada en Cedeira,night. MYCC Arquitectos, Madrid, 2010

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow

Sophie Fiennes. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, 2010Sophie Fiennes' Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow is a documentary about Anselm Kiefer's vast workshop, installation and landscape at Barjac which he worked in and on between 1993 and 2009.  It shows not just the scale of his work, but the violence with which the work is made: blowtorches, sliding concrete, molten lead, shattered glass, ashes treaded into enormous canvases which are slowly raised to vertical, the ash falls away from a charred forest.  Violence isn't the right word. Primitive industrial processes make the work: they are manual, physical and involve much breakage: of buildings, of materials, of ideas, of clarity.  Paintings emerge as pieces in just one of many stages of construction. 

Barjac was an abandoned silk factory, and has been abandoned again.  Evidently, from a Guardian interview with Fiennes, the film is near wordless – an interview with a German journalist, but otherwise, just Kiefer working.  From the clips on the Over Your Cities website, the film watches, the filmmaker's gaze is intense and calm.  Sophie Fiennes has made two documentaries with Slavov Žižek, which perhaps is why Kiefer appears deceptively un-theorised in Over Your Cities: there is no critical voice-over telling us how to consider his relationship to Germany and Naziism, to ideology and interpretation.  There is just the material experience of Kiefer making art.  The critical stance is in how the film presents Kiefer – a Lacanian position, knowing that the interpretation of the work is both inevitable and uncontrollable. 

Kiefer's project is enormous – it is the investigation and recovery of a German history that was suppressed for his generation.  For those born just after the war and living in reconstructed, prosperous, blithely a-historical West Germany where the war was blamed on the Nazis, not the Germans, just how consequential the historic narrative of German supremacy at the heart of national socialism had been led to the rejection of any kind of symbolism, national narrative or mythic structure.  Kiefer's work is about such things, while rejecting such things.  This gives it its confrontational duality, while its physicality is how Keifer speaks.

João Mendes Ribeiro

João Mendes Ribeiro. Mala-Mesa, 1998

João Mendes Ribeiro is a Portuguese architect, set designer, performance artist, theorist. The core of Ribeiro's work, according to Vasco Pinto whose essay on Ribeiro one can read in the usual bizarre translation provided by Google, is Uma Mala-Mesa, a table which packs itself in and out of a suitcase.  This transformative action is minimal in form, going from motion to stasis, from parts to construction to object, from solidity to spatiality.  The suitcase-table has been constructed many times for different locations from Morocco to Berlin to Prague with slight variations each time, and presented as installation, performance, film and dance. Inherent in the suitcase-table is its double referencing, which Ribeiro takes into his architecture. 

Ribeiro came to my attention through a Portuguese architectural photographer, Fernando Guerro, FG+SG who regularly sends us portfolios of new projects.  Ribeiro and Cristina Guedes collaborated on the 2009 Casa das Caldeiras, a new art studies building at the University of Coimbra which used an old steam plant and added a new building to house a cafeteria, bookstore, academic spaces for graduate studies. Exhibition space is in the old coal room.

Pinto, writing from within Portuguese culture sees the Casa das Caldeiras as about the primacy of form, and in the 100 or so photographs of this project you can see the theatricality of many of the spatial decisions: staircases are great wood sculptures in white-walled galleries, an outside deck is as narrow and precarious as a gangway over a stage. 

If there are any double references it is in the elision of architecture and performance, the conceptual underpinning to Ribeiro's work.  The sense of architecture here is not narrowly described as programme, or brand, or image, or budget, or context.  If these five conditions circumscribe one's architecture, then that is the architecture that results.  Last week I went to an absolutely numbing lecture by a well-known and respected Canadian architect who spoke only in these terms.  When I wrote the other day about work being used merely as a trigger for topical critical discourse, it has to be understood that there must be something in the work to initially nourish the discourse, something more than a preoccupation with image and brand.

Why does new work from Europe often look so beautiful?  I don't think it is my un-decolonised self asking this question, rather it is a recognition that the terms of reference we work under are not the only ones that contribute to the making of architecture.

FG+SG. Casa das Caldeiras, Coimbra, Portugal. 2010

Nathalie Lecroc

Nathalie Lecroc. Petite Anthologie de Sacs et Sacs a Main. No 432. After yesterday's post where I was in danger of boring even myself with its drear subject matter, I've gone back to the list of vaguely interesting but essentially lightweight things that sometimes come my way – fashion and such.

Now, tell me how Keifer and Nathalie Lecroc can exist in the same world, never mind the same sentence.  Lecroc draws, for considerable fees, the contents of people's handbags.  Can you imagine the panic that your handbag might not be good enough to be immortalised?  Do people go out and buy a lot of iconic pieces of chic or do they just hope that when drawn out in a fey and whimsical manner on a decent piece of Arches that their things will look okay?  It is rather like the panic that someone might catch you on Skype inadequately dressed in a t-shirt from Joe, rather than from Stella. 

Calgary is increasingly a city where such things count.  No credit given for creative shopping at Zellers, no, we have the largest and newest Holt Renfrew in the country.  The Sartorialist last week reported about cool young Russians who have turned away from cashmere and bling toward anti-fashion fleece.  This seems a very interesting move.


Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer. Zim Zum, 1990. oil, crayon, shellac, ashes, sand, dust and canvas on lead 3.8 x 5.6 m. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Yesterday after thinking about the large Gursky photographs and standing around in galleries looking at very large things I thought about Kiefer.  So I wrote the post below, and now find it has sucked all the light out of the day.  Too much Sturm und Drang for me.  I'd rather be looking at Ocean III.  However.

The first major Anselm Kiefer exhibition I saw was at the Saatchi Gallery in conjunction with several Richard Serra pieces – great slabs of steel balanced on their corners against the wall.  Someone had been injured in the installation.  Seeing the Kiefers was something like when an earlier generation first saw Mark Rothko's enormous, ambiguous colour fields at the Tate.  Kiefer's paintings cover whole gallery walls; one cannot get enough distance from them, one is completely humbled by them.

Much is written about the symbols and myths of German history and the Holocaust in Kiefer: Zim Zum, above, is from the Kabbalah and refers, roughly, to destruction and creative rearrangement.  And there appear to be many debates about whether a German can do anything with German myths and not be a closet Nazi.  Kiefer's work is both textual in that it insists on working with both Teutonic and Jewish history, and in its messy application of straw and mud, paint and dust, often to make great ploughed fields that appear to be totally barren, devoid of life, incapable of resurrection, work shouts out about the destruction of Germany.  It helps to know that Kiefer studied with Joseph Beuys. There is a sensuality that is not romantic in this work – perhaps it is the sensuality of melancholy and despair. 

I've never seen much renewal in Kiefer's work, although the symbols of such are supposedly all there in it.  This is one of the issues with text-based work and criticism: the work becomes the vehicle for another kind of project whereby the physical painting is cast as a cipher to a larger, off-canvas discourse which can change with political rapidity.  Meanwhile, one is left standing in front of a 3 x 5 m work which is unbearably, unrelentingly dark.  I think this has to be taken seriously as an end point: war destroys, and whatever replaces whatever is destroyed is never enough.  

Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky. Ocean V, 2010. 
Chromogenic Print 
366,4 x 249,4 x 6,4 cm. Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin.

Andreas Gursky is showing his series Ocean I-VI at Sprüth Magers Berlin right now.  The images are large – all around 2.5-3.5 m x 3m+, and originated in the kinds of views on flight monitors that show whatever the plane is flying over.  These are all images of the oceans, the land shows as busy little fragments around the edge: peripheral and of no great mystery compared to the seas which show as deep and silent.

Gursky apprenticed with Bernd and Hilla Becher, and something of their stillness underlies all his work.  While Ocean I-VI might look like straight satellite images, and indeed the bits of land are from satellite photos, the oceans themselves have been constructed.  There are no clouds or storms, their proportions aren't geographically correct – they take cartographic licence as all maps do.

These pieces of water all have names, but Gursky has called them simply Ocean I, Ocean II; just as land doesn't have all the political and economic markings we understand as constituting land inscribed on its surface, neither do the oceans have pink dotted lines floating on them marking 250-miles limits, or large letters floating across them saying Pacific Ocean.  Really, maps as we know them, are very crude. 

Gursky has, for many years, done large photographs of large things: immaculate and perfectly regimented crowds in North Korea, flattened screens of social housing projects, any repetitive elements that are so vast in number that they become a kind of colour field, which of course is the thing that pulls him away from the often near-identical photographs of Ed Burtynsky.  Repetition and the small shifts in detail in like objects were at the core of the Becher's work: I doubt they were wildly interested in water towers although they photographed hundreds of them. Their project was photographic, setting the camera in a precise and repetitive relationship with the subject, removing all the seductive elements the camera so easily exploits: colour, sun and shade, fast-frame capture of birds, wind, people.

Much is written about Gursky's work as a critique of capitalism: here are capitalism's excesses, with Burtynsky, Gursky and Polidori as a club going about documenting all its evils.  I'm not sure this is quite how it is, or all that it is.  There is a photographic project here, rather than a documentary project.  Oceans I-VI is not documentary, it is a construction of a mystery, of inaccessibility, of understanding something one can only see in the abstract; the near-impossibility of clicking out of the abstract into some sort of existential, phenomenological present, which can only be found at the scale of standing with one's feet in the water at Departure Bay and thinking 'this water goes to Japan'. 

small investments

Unilever India. Lifebuoy soap There was a thing on the radio this morning: BBCs Global Business, talking about a campaign to get everyone in the world to wash their hands after using the toilet.  Diarrhoea kills a million children each year, preventable by simple hand-washing with soap.  So Unilever, Proctor & Gamble – all the big corporations that make soap were approached and a strategy to provide both soap and initiative launched.

One of the most interesting things was to do with the size of the bar of soap.  The standard 500g bar is too expensive for the world's poor: it isn't that the soap is too expensive, but the investment in a large bar is impossible if one's income comes in daily and is spent daily.  By experimenting with 100g and 50g bars, it was found the the 100g bar of soap was both affordable and purchased.

This is an example of C K Prahalad's theory that there are vast markets at the bottom on the economic scale: sell millions of small things cheaply for much the same return as selling a couple of large expensive products.  Two loaded Ferraris or 2000 Tatas.

Prahalad felt that the poorest of the poor, who have ambitions and aspirations, make deliberate choices about where they put what money they have.  Their capital may be small, but it is capital nonetheless.  Discounting it because it is small and erratic, denies the poor access to many of the products that could improve their lives in terms of nutrition and health – the poor are denied any agency that their small incomes might give them.  Prahalad's view of capitalism from the bottom was tied to the issue of human rights.  He died a couple of months ago; he was only  68.

eikonostasia

Rutger Huibert. Ekklisakia, Greece, 2010

Evangelos Kotsioris and Rutger Huiberts, Rutger studying architecture at TU Delft, and Evangelos at the GSD, sent their survey of roadside eikonostasia in Greece for On Site 23: small things.  These are little shrines placed where someone has died in a traffic accident and Huiberts and Kotsioris talk about the transition from hand-made to manufactured shrines. 

We have roadside memorials here in Canada, in increasing numbers: mostly bunches and garlands of plastic and silk flowers tied to crosses, or telephone poles, littered with stuffed toys and scraps of paper – unruly, angry, sad, unresolved.  We didn't always do this.  I remember the first time I saw a roadside memorial when I drove to Kansas in the mid 80s: crossed the border into the States and there they were.  Had I ever seen one in Canada I would have taken them for granted, but I'd never seen such a thing before. 

As Huiberts and Kotsioris point out, they also act as road warnings.  In Montana, again in the 80s – don't know if they still do this– highway fatalities were officially marked by small white metal crosses: not memorials, just markers.  On the famous and very beautiful Going to the Sun Highway in Glacier Park every time you came around a sharp corner to find a fantastic view of yet more mountains, the foreground would have a flock of crosses where cars had taken the corner too quickly and someone had died.  It was very sobering.

Roadside shrines and markers are now the subtext to travel by car — a dark chorus to the freedom of the road.  Are our highway verges littered with wandering spirits consoling themselves with teddy bears and wreaths?  I'm not sure about this – not the spirits, but the need for flowers and toys.  I would hope that they have moved on.

street level

 Victoria Beltrano. Spadina and Dundas, Toronto. February 2010Victoria Beltrano has a good study in On Site 23: small things on the interface between the private building and the public world.  This interface happens at doorways and windows where the street wall of downtown buildings inflect slightly.   She shows one back alley behind a shopping centre appropriated by street traders who use tiny hooks and wires on the otherwise blank wall to hang their stuff on.  Another example is the four-inch ledge on a Shopper's DrugMart window lined with small steel points to keep people from appropriating the ledge to sit on. The third example is a doorway and attached vestibule in Chinatown with a step at the sidewalk that is used as an informal shelter, bus stop waiting area, a place to warm up in the winter. 

The point of the article is the degree of humanity allowed in the urban environment by how the surfaces of buildings at the street level are designed.  Hostile to indifferent to welcoming, much it seems has to do with propriety, possessiveness and sheer good nature.  or not. 

I think we all know how to design a good doorway, or a generous and welcoming window: it isn't our incapacity to make a city beloved; rather it is the citizens themselves who make decisions about children in the city, or the accommodation of the infirm, or buskers, or nomadic marketeers.  Some cities are intolerant.  Some are more easy-going, allowing informal life to happen in all sorts of nooks and crannies, in all sorts of unplanned ways. 

How would we put it to City Hall: we want planning departments and police forces to lighten up?  We want to legislate generosity?  We want a law to make everyone kind?  Yes, sure.